Two years ago, I despaired at getting any changes through the RS dev team which would allow it to work in a
distributed environment - the strings of spaghetti are too tightly intertwined - so I went off to learn a bit about
Object Oriented PHP and the Zend Framework, with the intention of rewriting RS as a framework app. A few months ago
I discovered Pimple - a Dependency Injection Container - which totally changed my way of thinking, and at the same
time I met Nicolas who was prepared to put up a bit of money to do some serious development.

The result is the first serious attempt to rewrite ResourceSpace, to make it cloud compatible and the first serious attempt to introduce the functionality needed to get it working in the AWS cloud.

What we really need now is support from the RS community - both in time and money. I recently gave up work to devote more time to RSitC, but that can only last a few weeks unless I can find enough sponsorship or related work to survive.

So if you feel you want to support this project and you want to be one of the first with a true cloud installation of RS - please get in touch.

Thank You
John Brookes
17/04/2014

ResourceSpace is an open source asset management system which is designed to be user installable and configurable with minimum input from the IT professionals. It works best in a LAMP environment, but many companies do not have Linux experience or spare servers lying around..

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provide virtual servers 'in the cloud', which are easy to set up and can be used to test ResourceSpace free of charge, and implement with no capital outlay. There are many ongoing advantages to using the AWS cloud as you move forwards, as it allows your ResourceSpace installation to grow and deliver the services you want to your customers on demand. The problem is that ResourceSpace does not scale or run in a distributed environment, which is where RSintheCloud comes in.

Back in 2009 I was doing some work for Dan at ResourceSpace on a new plugin for a company called shotfarm. Mike at shotfarm wanted a full time developer to work on this code, and Dan put us in touch with each other.

Mike had great ideas about moving shotfarm into the cloud, to develop a system which could handle hundreds of thousands of images and associated product data across a wide range of manufacturers and retailers, and it soon became apparent that this could not be achieved using plugins, so shotfarm branched off ResourceSpace, ripped out a lot of the complexity, and moved into the cloud.

After a number of false starts, we got shotfarm running on six server instances in the AWS cloud, with additional instances firing up on demand for transcoding, etc. Having done this once, I now want to make the techniques and technology available to all the RS community.